Timothy Edgar, a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute
whose International Relations seminar on cyber conflict has been attracting
many computer science concentrators, has been much in the news lately as he
provides regular commentary on the continuing revelations about NSA
surveillance.Edgar has been quoted in
stories in The
New York Times, Wall
Street Journal, and the Washington
Post, and was interviewed
by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

Timothy Edgar

Edgar served in the Obama and Bush Administrations as a top
privacy lawyer, doing stints in the office of the director of national
intelligence, and as the first ever privacy director on the White House
national security staff.“I worked with
teams of lawyers and technologists on putting together privacy safeguards for
some very sensitive programs, including those NSA programs that have been much
in the news,” Edgar said.“One of the
lessons I learned is the need for lawyers and policy officials to really listen
to computer scientists.In today’s
world, we cannot pretend it’s OK not to know how computers and the Internet
works.”

Edgar says he believes the programs raise real privacy
concerns, even with the detailed safeguards he helped put in place.“The public wasn’t given enough information
to have a meaningful debate about these programs,” Edgar says.He believes that debate is overdue, and that
Brown University has a range of expertise across multiple departments that can
contribute to it.“Issues of
cybersecurity and privacy are inherently interdisciplinary – drawing on
computer science, international relations, public policy, sociology, math and
many more disciplines in which Brown has enormous strengths,” he said.“It’s great to be here.”